I didn’t reference anyone by name, but you all have me thinking through my demo and considering adaptations. 

Here are some I’m considering:  

focus more on teaching the concepts of dominant, counter, and marginalized narratives prior to this kind of activity. Perhaps we can talk about them and look at one text and discuss these things together. More discussion about how texts don’t always explicitly state the dominant narrative but can be in reaction to that narrative – it exists without them stating it, and even if their audience is with other counter-thinking people, their texts exist within a relation to that dominant narrative.

For the activity itself, perhaps for the first 3 we will read and dialogue about dominant narratives, then switch to counter narratives, then switch to marginalized narratives or piecing out the other stuff we felt like we didn’t talk about – maybe the “how” it’s written part. This would give each student chances to identify narratives without too much repetition.

The discussion had me thinking about power structures within and placed on genres. The Tumblr posts and Zine articles elicited some dismissive comments. I don’t think that’s unusual, but I do think it’s something to talk about. More context about the types of writing people do and the kinds of places people go to discuss these things would be helpful.

Instead of the journal I noted, which could come much later in the unit/focus of that part of the semester, I could add a reflective component about the felt experience of having to identify one’s narrative in the class discussion, amongst fellow readers, and amongst the texts. How do we feel about the identities we write or speak our way into when discussing complex issues like this?

I like the idea of “who is this text inviting me to be?” It’s too easy to assume the intended reader is our current selves and our current rolse/positions, so if it doesn’t feel relevant to our roles and that moment, we can dismiss it. But if we are truly studying writing, then we need to go beyond texts written for teacher, student, business person, etc. 

In the Lobby of the Carillon by Rebecca Agosta

tall ceiling

heels clack on stone

the bell of the elevator

four women writing

soft chatter

cellphone in palm

the gurgle of a fountain

four women feeling

half moons of light bulbs

doors open and close

the echo of voices

four women observing

dresses and skirts

button ups and polos

the soft breath as the doors close

four women revising

light reflects

antlers wind

the constant hum of the grinding gears

four women sharing

outside, cars drive past

people walk to unknown destinations

the leaves rustle

For my inquiry, I’m continuing down the path of thinking about how inquiring into and later writing public, political, civic texts can allow for a rich learning experience. Part of the excitement with these texts is how limitless they are, how unfamiliar they can be, and how complicated their situations are. Perhaps I’m also interested in them because they force us into the wobble. The texts raise tensions between one another, with the writers, the readers, and the public spaces they occupy.

I read the article “Networking, Storytelling and Knowledge Production in First-Year Writing” by Octavia Davis and Bill Marsh, and they were looking at how “extracurricular” writing strategies and social networking served their students. They argue that this kind of writing study pushed students beyond only expressing personal problems to addressing “knowledge production and social inquiry”. This struck me as I read it, because one thing I often hear students say is that if it is an opinion or a belief than no one can argue with it. By addressing these things as knowledge production, we can start putting together ideas of how these belief systems are made, how language facilitates production and individuals taking on these ideas, words, etc., and how they turn into larger movements.

They also mentioned creating an online platform for students to use as a safe place to figure out this stuff.. and that reminded me of our Fecho reading and what safety means in a classroom. One of the things that teachers feel uneasy about with bringing in public texts is this idea of safety. Safe zone in the classroom to express belief systems and safe guards in place for underage student writing. For those of us teaching adults-- there’s still a concern of whether or not students recognize the risks associated with writing publicly. I’m wondering about the wobble and creating a space where students are “safe to engage in personally challenging explorations and lines of inquiry that called thinking into question. The paradox is that creating a space where it is safe to engage, inquire, and dialogue may feel very unsafe.”

I’m wondering what practices can be in place to help students work through the wobble they might feel when confronted with things that are uncomfortable. Very few freshman students reveal their struggles in the class with a teacher, so are there other avenues to do this?

Some might wonder why these texts are important. Marsh and Davis discuss how public texts are a way to fight against the strictly alphabetical writings often seen in schools, which deprive students from understanding varying strategies and genres. This made me think of a conversation I had with Amy and Amanda today about preparing students for college writing and how these students write so differently in each class that it seems an impossible task. But what if we focused less on teaching student specific forms to perfection and instead taught them how to recognize rhetorical situations, audience, genre expectations, and writing as a social activity. Perhaps then, the more kinds of texts they engage with and write, the more adaptable they will be as writers. I get that there are structures that exist that make certain forms really important to teachers and students (the stakes behind testing is nothing to shrug off), but a more open dialogue about various kinds of writing seems needed. 

The study used social media as a vehicle for students to engage in this kind of writing. It allowed students to tag posts, find others who were writing about similar topics, form and join communities, etc. Students publicly identified with their causes, which brought a new stake and power to their writing. It also created more room for the wobble as students sometimes wrote from assumptions, privilege, power, etc. And they need the guidance to inquire into how these things affect writing too.

“We define people’s writing as those pieces written by (usually) everyday people who seek to address some kind of injustice by documenting their lived experiences and using those experiences to argue for change or redress...Sharing and studying stories, in effect, creates conditions for social change." I often think about the power of a story. What does a privileged story sound like? An oppressed one? One filled with rage? With hope? We all tell our stories in different ways, and Marsh and Davis urge us to allow students to tell their stories.. to take the knowledge they gain from public texts and use it as a lens into their own experiences. 

So what all can we study and learn through public texts? I’m still trying to figure this out, as well as the “how to actually facilitate this” stuff, but some things I’m considering as things to learn from public texts are: genres, rhetorical situations, strategies, audience, persona of the writer, how our experiences shape our view of the writer/text, how public texts are in dialogue with other public texts (sometimes in support, in tension), privilege, power, the value of certain stories over others, the value of certain language over others, multimodal writing, circulation, spaces of public writing, social media, activism and “slacktivism”.... and I’m sure there’s more.

When we met for SI orientation, I was a little lost on what I wanted to inquire into before we met for our summer sessions. I was hung up on phrases like multimodal writing and international and/or multilingual students without really putting thought into what I wanted to know, learn, and explore about either. Since then, I’ve been immersed in a lot of social media through my blogging and my personal profiles (Twitter/Facebook), and my interest in the ways in which we all “go public” with our perspectives, experiences, and causes has continued to grow. If you look at my last post, I was still thinking about something that happened in my classes this past semester during a focus on civic literacies/engagement, so I decided to pick up that thread and go with it.

I read a few articles, and I will focus on two of them here, mostly chronicling my thoughts and questions. I know I’m late to publishing, but I hope to hear from lots of you too! :)

I decided to revisit a scholar that was pretty influential for me in graduate school, Nancy Welch. When I first read her works, I was compelled by her term “rhetoric from below”.  Welch defined the term as “‘rhetoric...not from official policy makers but from and to those who feel the daily effects of official policy”. At first I was troubled with the “below” aspect, as if that negated the importance of their communication, but then I realized that she was using terminology that allowed for distinction of power, shaping how their writing/speaking took place, was heard, was circulated, affected others, laws, perceptions, and so on. Her focus on every day people and how they come together or work individually on various issues resonated with me (and when I say focus, I mean her argument for the necessity to study and teach the practices and texts of “rhetoric from below”), so I looked at her text “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era” for SI. Side note, I’ve noticed a few texts call this “extracurricular” rhetoric/writing. I guess I can add that to my keywords.

I. Why “rhetoric from below”?

“By focusing on the "extracurricular" rhetoric that takes shape around kitchen tables and in rented rooms (Gere) and also in city streets and public parks, on picket lines and graffitied walls, I want to add to the growing body of work that has the potential to reorient us from regarding rhetoric as a specialized techne-the property of a small economic and political elite-to understanding and teaching rhetoric as a mass, popular art-the practice of ordinary people who make up our country's multiethnic, working-class majority, in their press for relief, reform, and radical change...However, by extending the common understanding of public rhetoric to include such examples of "rhetoric from below" I'm not simply creating a more inclusive sense of what constitutes rhetorical action. We don't just add such argumentative forms to the usual examples of "rhetoric from above" as a presidential address or newspaper editorials. What we do instead is create palpable tension between individual and mass, legislative and extra legislative, and ruling-class and working-class argumentative forums and forms.” - Welch (emphasis mine)

TL;DR: Welch wants to reorient our ideas of rhetoric from the powerful few to the many. She’s not looking to only create an inclusive collection of public texts; instead she wants us to see how rhetoric from different positions lie in tension with one another. 

One of the points that branched from her distinction above that I found interesting was the idea that all people who would like to involve themselves in public conversations must construct a “responsive public”. However, not all speakers face the same challenges and stakes as one another. I thought about this with my students and our conversations last year. They definitely had a sense of being listened to by some (peers, mostly) and not listened to by others (ex. parents), and they had a hard time even imagining other publics, let alone recognizing the work in building that audience. Another concern of Welch’s was an assumption on her students’ part that one must go public alone -- that it is a single speaker/actor making social change. Just thinking about the texts I often provide in class, I can understand how this assumption comes to be. One of Welch’s students asked, “but how do things evolve and how do we forge any sort of revolution if people don't come together?" Exactly-  there needs to be a more situated understanding of these texts. A look at how various texts work together and against one another, and how do we do that in a classroom? 

Welch’s piece is very complex, and I’m only hitting the surface of it. I’m sure some of the above is confusing, but it led me to the following ideas and questions:

1. I wonder how students will position examples of “rhetoric from above” and “rhetoric from below”. Students often come into the class with notions of valuable and not-valuable types of writing; these values are often ingrained in them from schooling, home life, and social practices. How will these values of genres transfer to their interpretation of these texts? How will privilege and their positions in life affect the readings of these texts? How can I incorporate reflection on the lenses we use to view texts?

2. Can I “handle” it? A classroom talking about topics that might be better held by someone who has actually taken a sociology class. Is there a need to “handle” it? What does tension look like in the classroom? At what point is tension counter-productive? How can we learn from these tensions rather than walking out of a class shaking our heads?

3. To what extent can we “go public” in a writing class in school? Some texts discussed room for “safe zones” to practice this writing. Welch herself expressed concerns over knowing her students rights when one of them gets pulled over for posting a flyer illegally. I’m thinking about the need to discuss “that exercising our public voices could be heady, daunting, and consequential.” I’m thinking about how the internet allows us to see the connected efforts in social movements that otherwise might not be available in a classroom.

Phew - Okay. I’m getting long-winded. The second piece was a lighter read. I read “The Politics of Persuasion versus the Construction of Alternative Communities: Zines in the Writing Classroom” by Aneil Rallin and Ian Barnard. I found this piece a little odd because even though the students are studying zines the entire semester, 2 out of their 3 big assignments were thesis-driven research papers, with the 3rd assignment being a zine. The authors seemed to really rage against the expectations of a first year writing class while also continuing to uphold those expectations -- perhaps there’s a lesson here in power, publication, and the ability (or lack thereof) to act on theory/values in the classroom.

I was first introduced to zines through social media. I am part of feminist / body-politics communities with blogging and Facebook, and a few of the UK and Australian bloggers I know were creating zines that would be sold at local events. While I know that not every blogger in the UK lives close to one another, many are able to see more of each other in person and they have more large-scale events annually than the US. I don’t hear about zines at all in the US community, and perhaps it’s because zines are often part of more localized communities. 

“Zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves… Zines are an individualist medium, but as a medium their primary function is communication. As such, zines are as much about the communities that arise out of their circulation as they are artifacts of personal expression.” --Stephen Duncombe

“...producing a zine becomes the means of forging community, usually a dissident community or network of like-minded people who feel alienated by mainstream culture. Zines thus enable the development of underground subcultures and nonconformist communities/networks.”

-- Rallin and Barnard

I find it interesting that zines both emerge from communities of thought and establish communities through writing and consumption. For me, zines open up a discussion of what writing does, both in the written act and in its circulation and consumption. "Undoubtedly material community engagements matter, but the production and consumption of zines too may constitute community engagement, may constitute political and public engagement.” So here.. we can think about what the materials do. Producing a zine can potentially be a political act, and yet there is often social activities around these material things, since zines are often sold in person or will have personal engagement with the creator(s). A lot of students assume that political writing is only pointed toward an opposing audience, but zines are often geared toward local, interested, and perhaps empathetic/sympathetic/celebratory audiences. 

Last note about zines: “Zines often use so-called unprofessional discursive styles that more accurately reflect language uses among people. Zines frequently acknowledge that professionalism reflects certain race and class biases. In addition, zine writers often make typos and grammatical “errors” a distinguishing characteristic of their work. Zines give our students the opportunity to make “inappropriate” and/or risky linguistic choices without being penalized. The material form is also significant: zines are sometimes handwritten, often illegible in parts, and usually photocopied and stapled.” I think this aspect of zines could open up a great discussion about language and power, as well as stylistic choices and how that aligns to belief systems and communities and rejects/reacts to those same things.

Read an interesting article this morning about women workers in the film industry. It was written in response to sexism and a particular Tumblr page that workers are using to talk about and talk back to these issues. 

This made me think about a text that I’ve shared with my classes before when talking about civic literacy:

When we talk about this piece, we discuss what the text itself is doing, its rhetorical moves and how it’s aiming to engage with its audience, but often what comes up is our individual vs. collective knowledge of film, awards, gender and race, and how those things shape the way that we read this billboard.

One class in particular this year did not want to accept the narrative that the billboard was building. “There aren’t many female directors.” “They shouldn’t give an award just because that gender/race doesn’t typically win it.” “Awards are based on the quality of the film.” “There aren’t many movies featuring people of color.”

I attempt, sometimes not so well, to get us thinking about what these narratives are really saying. Also, what are they not saying and what are they assuming. I find that many of my students do not believe that this is a true equity issue, and they have high skepticism when encountering the billboard.

But that takes me back to the Tumblr blog featured in the article: Shit People Say to Women Directors and Other Women in Film. For having only existed for a short time, they are already getting press and attention. Will we believe their stories more this way? How do we read these piece differently based on our understanding of the writers/speakers? How do the genres affect our interactions? What about the fact that it is anonymous? As someone who belongs to online groups, I at least feel like some women will say “me too” and others will become more aware of what these comments mean and end up doing.

The responses to the stories published on the blog were interesting, and gave me more to think about when it comes to what narratives we accept, how the composition affects this acceptance/rejection, and how our own ways of reading plays into it:

Social media is such an interesting writing space when it comes to engaging with audiences, development of content, authorial presence, anonymity, and so much more. I’ve always been interested to hear from the people these issues affect, and with the press this received, it seems the general public and/or media is making that more powerful too. I’m trying to think through if this will become something I continue to inquire into during our summer institute.